Arab liberty goes up in smoke

Tuesday September 13, 2011

Rania Hafez describes how the Western-style nanny state is the new threat to individual freedom in the Middle East

No one can claim that Arabs are not used to bans. Restrictions on political activities, freedom of speech and public assembly are part of an Arab’s day-to-day existence, notwithstanding the darling buds of the Arab Spring. But now it seems that governments in the Arab world have decided that it’s not enough to control the public actions and speech of their people, they also need to regulate their private lives and habits.

Freedom and democracy are lauded as the ‘Western values’ that have inveigled themselves into the new Middle East. But it seems that many Arab governments are more eager to adopt yet another contemporary Western doctrine, that of state interference in and regulation of private lives.

As Arab governments face the collective calls of their people for real political reform, they have resorted to a tried and tested alternative of state control: legislating on private behaviour. Several of them have enacted bans on smoking in public places, including cafes, restaurants and offices. Lacking the means to engage the people in real politics, governments have jumped on the Western bandwagon of personal politics. Under the guise of promoting healthier lifestyles, Arab administrations of all shades from ‘western-sympathisers’ in Lebanon, to more autocratic ones in Syria and Iraq, have adopted the mantra of safeguarding public health to regulate the social lives of the people.

It is a fact that smoking is widely prevalent in the Arab world. The shisha or hubble-bubble has been a feature of social life in the Levant for centuries. Working men in street cafes and women in social gatherings pass it around along with the daily gossip. Cigarettes easily found a place along the shisha, and although smoking has consistently declined in the ‘developed’ West over the past decade, it has doggedly kept rising in the Middle-East.

Arab anti-smoking campaigners have regularly argued for bans and restrictions, but the Arab populace, denied freedom in other arenas, have obstinately persisted in exercising that one personal freedom. Reduced to impotence politically, and with religious boundaries increasingly narrowing other lifestyle options, the shisha and cigarettes remain a personal choice that is socially acceptable regardless of class, creed or gender.

All this is about to change as the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ moves on from desert storms to encroach on this last bastion of Arab freedom. For decades denied political rights, Arabs now find themselves invited to acquiesce in their own subjugation, not through militarily oppressive measures, but in adopting that most modern Western phenomenon, self-disparaging guilt. Even in Gaza restrictions on smoking have become a priority for those concerned with the ‘morality’ of women, reducing their already limited social space.

Arab rebels should continue to light their cigarettes and pass their sishas around to stimulate political debate if they really want to oppose the worst sort of Western nanny-state domination of individual liberty and independence.

Rania Hafez is the director of the professional network Muslim Women in Education